New faces make 65pc of top lower house candidates

KABUL (Pajhwok): There are 66 women among the 238 top Wolesi Jirga candidates while 65 percent of them are new faces and one among each 13 candidates are affiliated with political parties, according to the initial results.

Except Ghazni province, the Wolesi Jirga elections were held across the country three months ago. The initial Wolesi Jirga election results from capital Kabul, the last province, were announced on Monday.

According to the initial Wolesi Jirga results announced by the Independent Election Commission (IEC), more than 1.3 million votes had been cast for top lower house candidates.

The results show among the top vote getters, 84 candidates are current members of the lower house while 154 others are new faces.

Prof. Wadir Safi, a political science lecturer at Kabul University, told Pajhwok Afghan News that the election of mostly new faces to the Wolesi Jirga proved that people were unsatisfied with the performance of the sitting lawmakers.

“People know that the incumbent Wolesi Jirga members worked for their own intest instead of people, he said.

Most of the top candidates are independent.

Information from the IEC shows that 221 of the total candidates are independent while five contested the polls on behalf of Junbish-i-Islami, three on behalf of Hezb-i-Wahdat Islami, Hezb-i-Wahdat Islami Mardum and Dawat-i-Islami, two from Hezb-i-Islami and one from Jamiat-i-Islami party.

Some other top Wolesi Jirga candidates have political parties affiliation, but they ran independently.

Wadir Safi said most of the Afghans had no good memories of political parties and they even hated their names. “That was the reason most people chose independent candidates”, he said.

Men and women candidates

Of the top candidates from 33 provinces, except Ghazni, 172 are men and 66 are women.

Nine female candidates, who appeared in the initial Wolesi Jirga results, are from Kabul, six from Herat, four from Nangarhar, three each from Kandahar, Balkh and Kuchis (nomads), two each from Kunduz, Badakhshan, Parwan, Takhar, Maidan Wardak, Baghlan, Helmand, Daikundi, Faryab and Ghor provinces and one each from other 18 provinces.

According to the IEC procedure, 68 of the total 249 seats of the lower house are dedicated for women and three allocated for Kuchis while the rest to women of other provinces based on their population.

Wolesi Jirga, provincial council and district council elections in Ghazni would probably be held together with the presidential polls in July.

Wadir Safi said women should have more seats in the Wolesi Jirga because he believed women were kinder and least corrupt compared to men.